1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to data transfer, and more specifically relates to improving efficiency of data payloads to data arrays accessed through registers in a distributed virtual bridge.
2. Background Art
Server computers are continuously managed to enable access to shared switches and other traffic routing resources. For example, contention for routing resources may exist when server computers are housed within racks for space and connectivity considerations, such as in a blade server computer arrangement. The server computers may experience transmission bottlenecks and delays when forwarding data frames through centralized switches, such as shared top of rack switches. Increasing the number of switches and associated connections to accommodate additional traffic may present configuration and management challenges, as well as increase hardware costs and latency. It is therefore desirable to increase the efficiency with which switches may forward data frames between server computers.
The prior art section below (referenced from U.S. Pat. No. 8,447,909) describes a method by which a controlling bridge can access registers within any bridge element of a distributed switch. Such requests traverse the interconnects of the distributed switch using many of the same resources that are used for normal Ethernet traffic. Typical accesses may include changing configuration settings, accessing various tables, such as insertion of entries into forwarding databases, and the like. This data access uses an indirect register interface in which there is a control register and one or more data registers to access large tables of data. Accessing the tables using the indirect indexing method requires large frames of control data. These large frames of register access compete directly with the available resources that are being used for normal Ethernet traffic (such as buffering resources, interconnect link bandwidth, etc). It is, therefore, desirable to make such accesses as efficient as possible.